Does anyone know how to handle how water is nearly colorless & transparent at it's shallow (ie, near a shore) but gets darker & more opaque as it's deeper? I'd guess some sort of math node on transparency. But, every tutorial I've read for water said don't use transparency along with reflection & refraction. Ideas? Matt

You could use a math node on reflection color. Though I don't know how you could acquire the distance to the bottom of your river/lake.

Do you know how I'd set that up? I'm still kinda clueless about nodes in the Material room. Matt

I'd say creating a Color Math ->Multiply node would do the trick. Plug the output of that color math node into the reflection input of the root node, plug the output of the Reflection node into one of the Color Math inputs. You'd have to make a node setup that somehow determines the distance to the bottom. I haven't the foggiest idea how to do that. The P (position) node only works on the current object, which is the water plane. You could paint a depth map of your river/lake in a 2D program. White for highest, black for lowest, greyscale in between. Then you could make an image_map node containing the depth map, plug the output into a Color_Ramp node, choose four different colors for the depth effects, and plug the output into the other input of the ColorMath_Multiply node. Just thinking aloud. I don't know if it'll work.

The atmospheric/volumetric effects don't seem to fit with this problem, since they need to be confined by the water surface. But the Fresnel node may be useful. I think you have to go back to P4 to get an answer: not a tool in the program but the methods people used for mist and fog effects. Apply several almost-parallel planes below the water surface, at increasing depth. Make them mostly transparent with a noise variation and some colour tint. I think Anthony Appleyard put something like this in freestuff, for underwater scenes. you might have to blur the texture you're going to apply to the underwater terrain, and I'd be careful about objects which intersect these planes. P5/6 have things like wave deformers which might help with this sort of thing. DAZ 3D and Runtime DNA have both sold underwater stuff, and there might be discussions archived in their forums.

Appleyard had a "fog" prop with multiple layers. But it won't import into P6 (it doesn't balk, P6 just doesn't do anything). I'll check with the other forums, but sounds like I'll have to get familiar with nodes.

This may or may not work: You could apply a transperency map with a gradation form black or gray to white. You could use either a math node (P node run thruogh a math functions node)or an image map with an image created in a paint program. Use this to create a transperency that would make the water transperent at the shore and more opaque as it gets further from the shore. The color in the water will be preserved. Depending on how the water plane is UV Mapped you may not be able to use an image map to do this with out remapping it. Hope it helps

Countach - On the image map idea, do set the Transparency Edge or Falloff to anyting? They're zero currently. And is there a good tutorial out there for all these nodes? Matt

Attached Link: http://www.castleposer.co.uk/free.html

I would experiment with the transperency falloff, but since falloff only applies to a surface's transperency as it is seen at oblique angles, I would think that it would have either no effect or would ruin it. I'm assuming that the water is being viewed at an oblique angle such as from the POV of some one standing on the shore. As far as tutorials are concerned, I don't know of any. hopefully some one will read this thread and post a link to one. I did stumble across a link yesterday in the forum to castleposer. There are free node based texture modifiers offered at this site, along with some excellent tutorials on similar subjects. The texture modifiers make gradations from P nodes in exactly the way I stated above. If you play around with the math funcions and the variables you should get what you want.

Execellent! Thanks for the link. I'll try them tonight.

DrMCClark wrote: Appleyard had a "fog" prop with multiple layers. But it won't import into P6 (it doesn't balk, P6 just doesn't do anything).

Make sure that the camera is looking across the planes and not along them. My fog prop is made of many parallel vertical planes.

This may not be what you want to hear, but the best solution is to render your scene in something other than Poser. Bryce and Vue have a range of realistic water materials and handle refraction well. This is really not Poser territory.